Behind every raga you learn is a way of organising music that students still use today. Meet the musician who built it.
Who was Bhatkhande?
Pandit Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande was born on 10 August 1860 in Bombay (now Mumbai) and died on 19 September 1936. He is remembered as the person who gave Hindustani classical music a clear system for teaching, writing and organising ragas, so that students could learn from books and classrooms as well as from a single teacher.
The ten thaats
His best-known contribution is sorting the ragas of Hindustani music into ten parent scales, called thaats. He modelled this on the melakarta classification of Carnatic music. Each thaat has seven notes, and every raga is placed under the thaat whose notes it is closest to. The ten thaats are:
| Thaat | Ragas you may know |
|---|---|
| Bilawal | Alhaiya Bilawal, Bihag |
| Kalyan | Yaman, Bhupali |
| Khamaj | Khamaj, Desh |
| Bhairav | Bhairav |
| Poorvi | Puriya Dhanashri |
| Marwa | Marwa |
| Kafi | Kafi, Bhimpalasi |
| Asavari | Asavari, Jaunpuri |
| Bhairavi | Bhairavi |
| Todi | Todi, Multani |
The thaat system is a teaching tool. Some ragas do not fit neatly into one thaat, and some musicians use other ways of grouping ragas, but the ten thaats remain the standard starting point in classrooms and exams.
Books and a school
Bhatkhande wrote the four-volume Hindustani Sangeet Paddhati, still regarded as a standard reference for North Indian classical music, and collected and notated many compositions. He is also associated with a widely used notation system. The Marris College of Music in Lucknow, opened in the 1920s (most accounts say 1926) with a syllabus he helped to shape, is now the Bhatkhande Music Institute University.
Why it matters for students: the ten thaats are part of many music syllabi. Rabindra Bharati University and Visva-Bharati both ask students to know them, as do many exam boards. See our university music courses guide.